QuickPlay can be controlled with the first joypad/joystick/gamepad plugged in (any type should work even non-usb!), either analog or digital stick will work. Navigation goes like this:
- Roms view: if you don't see a selected item on the screen, it means you've just navigated to a new roms view (so there's no existing position) - in this state you can press up to start navigating the list from the end, or down from the beginning. Pressing button 1 will launch a game, button 2 will expand the rom if you're in 'Goodmerged' view mode
- Folder Sidebar (left hand side) Button 1 will expand or contract an expandable folder
- Media Panel Button 1 will move to the next tab, button 2 to the previous tab
However, with a frontend that launches countless other emulators, you have another problem to consider: you can launch a game from any of hundreds of emulators using your joypad, but when you've finished playing your game, how are you going to get back to QuickPlay using your joypad? Can EVERY one of your emulators be configured to exit with the same joypad button?
So whether or not you use QuickPlay's joypad support, you may also want to consider using joytokey in order that the most common quit keys for emualtors (Escape and Alt+F4 on Windows) can get permanently mapped to some obscure combination of your joypad buttons. Take note that MAME has such a low-level Joypad driver that it will ingore everything including joyToKey so you'll have to setup that same combination within MAME (which is really easy). Then you'll be able to 'surf' QuickPlay's lists (and did you know a romdata list in QuickPlay can use a different emulator for each game in it)